“I’m trying to be reasonable,” Zuckerberg said from his office in downtown Indianapolis on Tuesday. “I just want to be left alone. I’ve got better things to do than fight with Meta. I’d rather just be attending to my clients, and then joining my family. But I don’t know how else to make them stop.”
Facebook’s accusations stuck, even after the lawyer provided verification documents, like his professional license. He said that he continued to lose access for months at a time. A recent suspension lasted six months.
A screenshot from Mark S. Zuckerberg’s account that was included in his lawsuit against Meta.Credit: Mark S. Zuckerberg, via New York Times
He had been suspended for about four months, most recently, until he filed the lawsuit last week and his suspension was lifted.
“We have reinstated Mark Zuckerberg’s account, after finding it had been disabled in error,” a Meta spokesperson said this week. “We appreciate Mr Zuckerberg’s continued patience on this issue and are working to try and prevent this from happening in the future.”
Zuckerberg said that he has been suspended for a combined total of more than 10 months over the past couple of years. “If I had patience, I wouldn’t have sued them,” he said. “I’d like this resolved finally.”
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He said that the lawsuit was already successful, in a way, because he got his Facebook business page back up, after four months of appeals “going nowhere”.
As far as damages, Zuckerberg wants Meta to pay for his lawyers’ fees; his information technology team, which handles his online advertising and has additional work each time he has had to go through Facebook’s lengthy appeals process; and $US11,000 ($16,677) for money spent on Facebook ads that he said were a waste.
Facebook is a crucial platform for finding clients, Zuckerberg said, because his competition is there, and also because most of his clients don’t know a lawyer or how to find one.
“It’s usually a one-and-done type of thing,” he said of personal bankruptcy. “So it is important to market, and keep your name out there and try, and get to the people that are in trouble, so you can help them and file a bankruptcy for them.”
Though the lawsuit is giving Zuckerberg and his law practice media attention around the world, he said that he’d much rather be talking about bankruptcy than Facebook.
“I want them to promise that they really, really will fix it this time,” he said. “Which I don’t know if they can.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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